Nick Brooke

If Tamali had migrated south with Moorgaki, their descendents would be Hot Tamales. I don't make the rules.

What an excellent question! Given what I do for Chaosium, I spend a fair amount of time analysing this sort of thing. With the vital caveat that it's not all about the sales, the worst-selling Jonstown Compendium products are: Foreign-language titles; Non-RuneQuest titles (only one QuestWorlds title has gone Electrum); Exotic settings (outside Dragon Pass, Prax & the Lunar Empire); Art packs, tokens and maps (inc. battle-maps and regional maps); Expensive titles (none of our Gold best-sellers cost more than 15 cents per page in digital format; prices set by community content creators have ranged as high as 50 cents per page); Combinations of the above (e.g. two of the four remaining QuestWorlds titles are set in the exotic mediaeval Malkioni West of Glorantha). My own preference is for RuneQuest scenarios that a group of freebooting adventurers like Vasana & Co. (or indeed any rag-tag bunch of the Starter Set pregens) could play in, as I can use them with my own gaming group. Scenarios or campaign settings that require the adventurers to come from a specific clan, tribe or far-away nation aren't nearly as useful to me. Chaosium's advice in the RQG Core Rules and GM Screen Pack Adventure Book is that the default homeland for adventurers should be Sartar, that within Sartar the default tribe is the Colymar tribe, and that any party of adventurers should ideally include an Orlanth and Ernalda worshipper, in order to make best use of the setting's mythological underpinnings. It's pretty clear that adventurers are expected to be or become Argrath loyalists as the Hero Wars progress. The further you deviate from those basics, the fewer groups will be able to use your material. I stick to them rigidly in my own works like The Duel at Dangerford and Black Spear. Please note that I don't practice everything I preach. I'm delighted my stuff has been translated into French, German and Japanese (albeit those are my worst-selling titles), I've published a non-RuneQuest freeform and an exotic Malkioni artbook (also among my worst-selling titles), and Jon Webb's successful Sandheart series is for groups utterly unlike Vasana & Co. in location, time period and party composition (albeit they tap into a popular old-school setting from the RQ Classics and the nineties RQ Renaissance). If you want to know what's popular, my Jonstown Compendium Catalogue details everything published in the first two years of community content: major releases are ordered by best-seller tier and then by the number of ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings. It comes bundled with sales charts for every major release (older versions are in this thread). NB: sales of things I don't consider "major releases" are generally significantly lower: this includes most of the shorter/pricier works, and all of the artpacks/tokens/maps. While there are a few outliers -- Heortlings of Sartar and Trinkets from Dragon Pass did much better than other works from the Conrad and Quatrini stables -- the trend is, I think, clear.

Confirmed from the Dragonmeet (Dec 2019) draft: Xiola Umbar Rune Priestesses still get Attract Attention, Group Defence, Turn Blow, and Shield of Darkness, four cult special Rune spells which aren’t available to initiates. JDM listed the Rune spells available to initiates. There are also a handful of Enchantments available to Rune Priestesses, but they’re fairly boring and it’s getting late.

Phew! Just back from Chaosium Con. Updated again on 13 April: now contains 794 titles. We have a new Platinum best-seller in Korean: Phantom Blue Mist has sold more than 1,000 digital copies, the first Korean title to do so.

Here they are as .PNG files, which might be easier for you to work with.

They’re available in the Files area of the Jonstown Compendium Creators’ Circle group on Facebook. You want Right background.psd and Left background.psd

To be clear: coupons are only mailed out once the printed book becomes available to order. Don't worry if you don't have a coupon yet: nobody does. If the book comes out in print and you don't also receive a coupon through email, first check your spam folder then reach out to Dustin for support. He is there to help!

Oh, I had a whale of a time. Great gaming with great friends (old and new).

Yes, that’s fine. Thanks for asking. Sorry about the delay in replying, I was flying home from Chaosium Con.

Speculation: now that all initiates get reusable Rune magic (in RQG), there’s no need for the Cult of Donandar to have loads of Acolytes. In the before times, most cults used Rune spells largely for matters of life and death; the Donandar cult routinely used them for entertainment purposes.

I’ve checked with @MOB and this is fine. We don’t consider a browser-based solo adventure using hyperlinks for navigation to be “software.” Please follow all requirements of the Fan Material Policy, and reach out if you have any more questions (my email’s in my sig).

There’s a genre expectation that heroic adventurers could heroquest / obtain tomes & blessings etc. to bump up skills that would otherwise be slow or tedious to increase. The alternative is No Fun, which is in direct conflict with MGF and is therefore deprecated.

“You don’t know enough about Glorantha to have fun in my game” is a terrible message, and flies in the teeth of MGF.

I don’t think anything more than basic formatting (like the final file I sent you for the Coders) is necessary. Rick will be happy to receive a clean Word document and drop it into InDesign, you don’t need to put it into some Chaosium template or try to imitate the look and feel of… I’m not sure what, exactly. Clean text, basic header styles, and he can do the rest. It’ll probably be easier if we don’t mess it around first.

You can see what I do: it’s in Black Spear. There are five or so heroquests in that story, depending who’s counting. A “magic road” (Act 2), a temple incursion (Act 4), a static power-up (Act 5), disrupting someone else’s ritual (Act 6), and getting lost on the hero plane (Act 7). All you need is a standard RQG character sheet, plus attitude. People telling you that you need new rules and stats and stuff aren’t trying.

I don't want to put words into your mouth, @EpicureanDM, but are you asking us "How could you defeat these monsters without making it an interesting story or making use of Glorantha's history and mythology in any way?" Because the answer to that, obviously, is "You can't." There are epic scenarios on the Jonstown Compendium that show you how to bring absurdly powerful creatures into consequential RuneQuest play. Check out Drew's Company of the Dragon, or my own Black Spear. But they aren't about going toe-to-toe with kaiju, or arm-wrestling King Kong into submission, because that'd be silly.

"How did Jack get to be as big and strong as all those Giants he killed?" "How did Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit, get to be more powerful than Smaug, an ancient red dragon?" If those look like sensible questions to you, you'll probably enjoy SuperRuneQuest.

Then you need a better GM. Luckily this campaign just ended, so it’s time to shop around.

If your group is playing SuperRuneQuest variants like Simon’s, with loads of “heroquest rewards” to escalate adventurers’ capabilities, you can certainly power up enough to go toe-to-toe with those grossly-statted monsters, defeat Harrek, and so on. The problem is, you’re not really playing RuneQuest the way the rest of us do at that point, and anything Chaosium brings out won’t easily work in your games. That’s kinda why many of us have moved past that model. But if you and your GM like “levelling up,” there’s nothing wrong with that, and you can treat those gross stats as a challenge, rather than a warning. Dorastor: Land of Doom for RQ3 had similarly gross monster statblocks: Sandy (Call of Cthulhu) Petersen likes writing them that way. The problem is that there wasn’t a campaign structured to let you toughen up enough to beat them. (There isn’t one in Call of Cthulhu, either, which may explain why he wrote them that way: these are ancient terrors, not monsters to be defeated in attritional melee rounds). But people play RuneQuest with different expectations. Work out where you’re happiest, and play it that way.

The Ancient City by Peter Connolly was one of our references for Citizens of the Lunar Empire: it covers classical Athens and Rome. He also illustrated various Mycenean-era strongholds in The Legend of Odysseus, which is VERY Bronze Age. (Obligatory mention: three more of Peter Connolly's books covering Greeks, Romans and Carthaginians are in the Bibliography at the back of RuneQuest Classic - he's been with us on every step of this journey through Glorantha)

The Corn Dolls by Jonathan Webb has half a dozen beautifully-drawn and -mapped farmsteads based on Bronze and Iron Age examples. Perspective views by Kris Herbert, plans by Jon Webb.

Or perhaps a visionary Storm Bull cult leader who's (perhaps unknowingly) been corrupted by Chaos? (Just saying, Lord)

Mate, you can't defend the crappy "Cults of Terror" cult write-up by talking about what you've deleted from your own private working draft. Because the "Cults of Terror" version is the only one we have. And it's full of "anti-Storm Bull" nonsense... including one bit that somehow got through your revisions.

Remarkable. "HOLY DAYS AND HIGH HOLY DAYS: The cult deliberately aligned its ceremonial days to conflict with those of the Storm Bull. Thus its holy days are during Stasis week of each season: on Freezeday in Sea-season, on Waterday in Fire-season, on Clayday in Earth-season, on Windsday in Dark-season, and Fireday in Storm-season. The cult high holy day for the year also is Wildday, Stasis week, Storm-season." Rune spells: Defend Against Law; Face Law. Face it, you're missing the obvious. The cult was written up as an "anti-Storm Bull," in ways that make bugger-all sense, and to which you are now turning a blind eye.

Krarsht is written up as an "anti-Storm Bull" in some ways, but I find those bits of the cult silly and wouldn't put any weight on them.